Northwest Florida Community Hospital (Snu)

With an address in Chipley, Florida, Northwest Florida Community Hospital (Snu) is one of a mere two nursing homes in this city. This is a quality nursing home. We awarded this it an overall grade of B+, which is very good score. Based on our assessment, this nursing home looks like a solid choice for most people. More information on this nursing home's category grades is available below. Its best category is long-term care, which is discussed in the next section.

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ long-term care grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in this category it generally means it's well-staffed and is an overall good place to live on a permanent basis. In addition to providing well above average levels of nursing care, this nursing home gave the pneumonia vaccine to 99.23077 percent of its patients. Vaccines are vital to keeping residents out of the hospital. Lastly, we looked at the facility's number of hospitalizations. We found that this nursing home had 2.35 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days.

This facility also earned an A+ inspection grade, making it one of the few nursing homes to receive multiple A+'s in our category grades. This score is based on the facility's recent inspection reports. Arguably the most significant factor we consider in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities with higher grades in this category most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This nursing home received 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be major deficiencies. This indicates that the government inspectors didn't consider any of these deficiencies to pose an immediate risk to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

The next highest grade we gave this nursing home came in the category of nursing, where we gave it a grade of B-. This wasn't quite as good as some of its other scores, but a grade in this range is not the end of the world. The nursing score weighs numerous subcategories. The most heavily weighted variable is the amount of time nurses spent with residents. This place provided 4.4 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This is an impressive figure. Finally, we also factored some quality-based metrics into our nursing grades. Specifically, we looked at the percent of residents who sustained pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these metrics as reliable measures of the quality of nursing care, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

This nursing home's least impressive category was short-term care, which is the last category we scored. Unfortunately, we gave it an F for this area. Even with multiple favorable grades in other categories, this grade is nevertheless a bit alarming so we felt obligated to make sure you are aware. In the category of short-term care, we try to assess measures of a facility's rehabilitation services. We assess a facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses and various therapists. In this nursing home's case, it looks like it provided less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than the average facility. The final item we looked at in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 26.4 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor metrics sunk this facility's short-term care grade.